For HBO’s “U.S. Against the World,” producers Rand Getlin and Janina Pelayo went behind-the-scenes with the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team’s journey to the World Cup for four years — a massive undertaking for even the most experienced, well-backed documentarians.
Getlin and Pelayo, the husband-and-wife team behind small-scale production company Park Stories, were first introduced to soccer via a Quibi series centered on American soccer player Tyler Adams. Despite the daunting task, they ultimately produced the docuseries, which is now streaming on HBO Max.
What made them confident they could do it? “Naïveté worked in our favor,” Getlin told TheWrap’s Office With a View, while underscoring the duo’s confidence in gaining trust from notable athletes, especially in his previous role as an NFL insider, as well as telling their stories in previous short-form videos. “What we understood very well — and I’ve done it professionally — was connecting with humans, telling human stories, getting information that other people couldn’t gain access to.”
“[It’s] a little bit of crazy until you do it,” Pelayo said, noting the tremendous amount of puzzle pieces required to fall into place to get the ‘white glove’ picture of the road to the World Cup, including getting players, staff, organizations and media partners on board.
“One thing falls away — any one thing you don’t get done properly — and the show is materially damaged,” Getlin said.
The following is a conversation with Getlin and Pelayo, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
TheWrap: Diving into longform TV was a first for you, but there certainly was a strong basis with your previous partnerships and athlete-led docs. What were the biggest challenges you faced as you kicked off this project?
Getlin: They were myriad. This is a massively challenging project to pull off. You had to get the United States Soccer Federation and then the United States National Soccer Team Players Association to agree at the at the threshold of this thing to do this project together — it’s hard enough in normal circumstances to get a federal labor union and federation to come together. Everybody agreed to march into this thing together, and then the hard work starts, right?
The players were not obligated to participate. You’ve got 26 players that are on this final 2026 World Cup roster, and you had to win over each player individually. You had to win over their families individually. We had to win over all the staffers individually. There was a coach, Gregg Berhalter, who we had to earn trust with, and we did so over two years, and then, unfortunately, he lost his job in 2024 and a new coach comes in, and you have to start from scratch again.
The relationships you’ve built have paved the way for a project like this. Over the years, what have you learned about building trust with your subjects?
Pelayo: They’re human beings, and they’re amazing human beings at that — it’s not just an immediate image that they’re trying to portray. They have taken on a lot of the pressures of being this emergent, generational talent for America, and it’s such a new sport — the popularity is still growing — so they go through a lot without people really noticing, or appreciating it, so for us, we just care so much that it means so much to them. We work really hard in like creating a space that puts them first, letting them do their job — they’re here for a brief time together in the national team, and that’s kudos to the type of crew that we bring in. You know you can lose it at any moment, and at the end of the day, you don’t want the production to be the reason why something goes wrong or something fell off.
Coming from a smaller production company, how have you learned to stretch the resources you have?
Getlin: We bet everything on everything — it’s always been all in for us. We’ve never not pushed all our chips into the center when we believe in something, and that’s what it requires. You have all these massive athlete shingles … that were getting a lot of these massive rights for the athlete docs or the sports docs, and so we had to zig when they zag seven years ago when we began this journey. If you make really intelligent bets, if you make a large concentrated bet —whatever that is for you — on an undervalued resource at the right time, and it goes parabolic, then you can win in massive ways.
We don’t have an infinite war chest. We can’t just spend our way out of things, and so we’ve got to be a lot more nimble. We have to wear more hats, we have to be more willing to do the work, and we have to be relentless. You can’t take a break. If we just do that, and we continue to lean into the most powerful thing we have, which again is our power to ability to connect with with humans in a real way
What do you have your eyes on next? What are the gaps you’re seeing in the marketplace?
Getlin: It’s like a forever franchise for us, right? We wanted to create something that was singular and undeniable, and we believe that at least the way that it’s been responded to thus far, we have created something differentiated, and and we have this X factor.
We’re very much like, less is more. We do not want to become a volume shop. We want to do fewer projects at a much higher clip. Sports rights continue to increase in value at pace, and as AI changes everything around us, one thing that’s going to remain — at least in the relative short term — is we’re going to want to see humans compete against other humans in sports. It’s the greatest drama you know that we have, and so we want to be really like intentional. We’re not chomping at the bit to just jump into new projects, and I think that’s important. And so when we were having conversations now … in the future we’re partners, we don’t rent ourselves out, we don’t intend to, and so to the extent that we can create circumstances like this one where we come together and we create something together, we want to share in upside outcomes.
Pelayo: I am looking forward to just showing and relating — letting viewers relate to athletes or humans where they’re at. A lot of people like to go for the sure thing, a heralded star on their way out in retirement, whereas, for me, I find a lot of value in like living the process as they are living through it, as they’re failing, as they’re picking themselves up, because that’s what we go through every day.
What advice do you have for young people entering the industry?
Pelayo: It’s natural to feel lonely and dejected at times. I feel like this industry gains their power in making it a big mystery for people to try to do this, and just to kind of stick with it, and have faith in yourself. You’re going to get a bajillion pushbacks before you get someone to who opens the door. We’re out to prove … to a lot of people that what they’ve been doing — it can be done in other ways and still be really powerful for the viewer.
Getlin: We really have aggressively done our own thing … we don’t worry about market research, we don’t pay too much attention to the algorithm, we have to create things that are commercially successful, but we also have to follow our hearts and our intuition, and we know that the most valuable unit of story that we can share with people is emotion. For young people, what I would say is like the one thing we’ve always wanted to do is like inspire young people to push, to stretch the dream, don’t fall victim to this notion that it’s all falling apart. The story of human history is resilience.
